Thursday, March 02, 2006

Rushdie's Recipe For Gurudom

Just posted to GuruRatings, a quote from Salman Rushdie about some of India's great satscamming gurus [Ed.note: Pay close attention, Sri Sri, Sai Baba and Kracki, this is all about you!]:

The creative imagination possessed by a great scam artist is of high order, one can't help but admire. What surrealist boldness he displays in the conception of his deceits; what high wire daring, what mastery of illusion. The flim flam maestro is a superman for our times; disdaining norms, scorning convention, soaring beyond the gravitational pull of plausibility, shucking off puritan naturalism that would hold most ordinary mortals back. And if in the end he comes unstuck, if his ruses fail like the melting wings of Icarus, then we love him all the more for revealing his human frailty, for falling fatally to earth. In his moment of failure, he deepens our love and renders it eternal.

We have been privileged, in India, to observe at close quarters some of the very best–the best of the best–members of the trickster hall of fame. As a result we are not easily impressed, we demand the highest level of performance from our public crooks. We have seen too much, yet we still want to be made to laugh and shake our heads in disbelief. We rely on the scamster to rekindle a sense of wonder dulled by the excess of our daily life.

.... An appropriate name for your blog could have been Neti Neti.— Rama

While we understand that gurus are held sacred by many, they
are also public figures deserving of scrutiny. Our primary aim
is to inject a little humor into what can be an excessively
self-righteous enterprise, and to illustrate the primary truth that
no matter how divine their devotees believe them to be, gurus
poop on the same pot we do.